Reflection 1: Pre-departure 17 April 2006

Budapest 31 December 1983

And now I remember the song of the Gene like so much: 'what will it take - to whip you into shape - a broken heart - a broken heart - It can be arranged - it can be arranged'. Why then is this sense of waking up, of giving up, of abandoning all hope larger than life, always fresh and astonishing and not quite credible? why indeed? Enough of this self-pitiful self-hatred, impossible to get out of or get any sense out of anymore, and I'd rather be in China. I write all this only for ritualistic reasons, because I happened to be writing when the hour of the annual rite approached, and much as I respect your opinion on the matters, I have never been terribly impressed by your ability to make sense out of my own life. It is really asking far too much, since direct experience has always been the source of all my own insights, that you give me insights merely on the basis of my insights. Research is not exactly, as Burt says, the process of fidning that there is no particular reason why you shouldn't hold your preconceived opinions, but it is curiously difficult to make sense out of someone else's records, isn't it?

*) quoted from a book I read in Beijing 2004. Slipped the notes on the title and author somewhere.